If you're at all like me, sometimes you realize thatyou use text animators just a little bit too much.And so in this video, we're going to function on howto actually create animation when you don't have the font itself.So, we'll actually just start inside of Illustrator.Let's jump in.If you navigate in your Exercise Files into the GraphicalElements folder, in there you'll find the type logo outlined.ai file.Once you open that inside of Illustrator,you'll see our pretty straight forward text logo.

Now if you click and drag with your mouse, makingsure to select the text, notice the text is outlined.Now this outline is letting me know that it's not editable text anymore.Now, I just happened to have done that with all of the text inthis specific instance.Now, once you have text outlined, it's important to know what elementsreside on what layers, so let's jump over into the Layers panel.And sure enough I have my line broken out fromthe word technologies, as well as our SYSCHARGE text here.

Now this is pretty much ready to import into After Effects.The reason I say pretty much, is because we mightbe jumping back here into Illustrator in just one quick second.And I'll show you why.Inside of After Effects, just have a new, blank project open.And then double click in the Project panel.Navigate to your Graphic's Elementsfolder, and select the Type_Logo_Outline.ai file,and under Import As, change that to Composition Retain Layer sizes.Now when you click Open, it will go and create a compositioninside of After Effects.

If you double click the comp, notice we have all ofour separate layers, just like we would have in any other project.Now, the first thing I want to do is just select myblack Background layer, and press Delete on my keyboard to delete it.Since my composition color is already black, this way I can justmake sure that I've got transparency where the black is within my composition.Now I'm going to change my magnificationto fit up to 100%, and I want to show you one other thing.If you select any Vector Based Layer, ofcourse you can press S and increase the scale.

And, I'm sure you all know, if youcollapse transformations, that'll keep that layer nice and sharp.Well, let me me just Cmd+Z to Undo those last two things.Another way to manipulate this layer is to actually change it into a Shape Layer.So let's select Layer three, and go upunder Layer and choose Create Shapes from Vector Layer.Now, if your text disappeared like mine did, don't panic.Just press Cmd+Z or Ctrl+Z on Windows to Undo, and weare going to jump back into Illustrator here for a quick second.

In the essentials preset for the layout, downhere at the bottom we have our art boards.And notice there are two art boards, and reallywe only need one for importing the After Effects.As a part of the video template, it actually is two art boards.So, let's just Delete this second art board,and go up under File and choose Save.Once we're back inside of After Effects, everything should be good to go.I should be able to just select Layerthree, go up under Layer and choose Create Shapesfrom Vector Layer.

Now notice Layer four's visibility has been turned off,and Layer one has changed into a Shape Layer.I'm going go ahead and crank up my magnification to 100%, sowe can see our text nice and bold here in the center.When you have text as Shape Layers, you can actuallyanimate those Shape Layers with their own set of properties.So let's go ahead and open up theShape Layer Properties on Layer one.Under Contents, notice we have each individual letter as its own group.

This is great, because I could open each individual group andmake adjustments say to the fill of just this one layer.Now of course I want to make an adjustmentto all of the groups within my contents here.So I am going to select the word Contents andclick on the Add button, now I want to add the Wiggle Paths option.When we do that, notice it automaticallycreates this wiggle path distortion for our text.

So I can go ahead and open that,and adjust things like the size of this distortion.So, here I can make it a little bit less,and I could increase the detail if I wanted more waviness.And if we go ahead and load up a RAM previewhere, you'll notice it's kind of subtle, but it's actually already animated.I'll go ahead and press the spacebar there, andyou can see my text is kind of moving around.So, when you convert Vector Based Layers into Shape layers, youhave all the animation capabilities availableto you for Shape Layers themselves.

Now another way to createanimation without having the font, is toactually just Copy and Paste the outlines themselves.So in order to do that, what I'm going to dois jump back to my Illustrator file one more time, andinside of Illustrator in the Layers panel, I'm going to goahead and click on the target next to my word, SYSCHARGE.Then I'll go up under Edit and choose Copy.Now if I jumpback into After Effects, I can go up under Layer and create a new layer solid.

I want to make sure that it is the Comp Size and click OK.Now all I have to do is go up under Edit andchoose Paste, and sure enough the text has been pasted as a path.If you press M, it'll show we have amask path that's been applied for each individual letter.This gives you the ability to createanimation using the different Path Animation Tools.So just to show you one, I'm going to select Layer one and go up under Effect,and go down to Generate, under Generate I want to choose the Vegas effect.

Vegas will allow me to actually merge my blend over top of my graphic,or just Over Transparency. So I'm going to say Over Transparency.And, if I scrub through, notice there isn't any animation set, pre-set to Vegas.But, I can quickly and easily animatethese little dots, just by adjusting the rotation.Now, I think this is a little busy.So, I'm just going to decrease the number of segments, down to around three.

And, then I'll go ahead andclick and drag on the rotation, and here you can see I've gota much more interesting animation that Icould create just by keyframing the rotation.Now if course if I wanted to blend thesetwo, I could select Layer one, and hold downShift as I move up, and just kind ofoffset that glow over top of my white text.So of course, I could go back here under my Shape Layer and change the fillas well.Let's say I want to change that to kind of a darker yellow, I could do that.

So, as you can see, when it comesto actually animating text without having access tothe fonts, as long as you have accessto the shapes themselves or the Vector Layers themselves.You have a host of different things thatyou can do with animation inside of After Effects.

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Released

11/12/2013

This episode of After Effects Guru combines the powers of Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, and Illustrator to help you make polished logo animations for your clients. Learn how to use the Keyframe Assistant to build animations with multiple repeating elements, and animate with color, starting with grayscale values you'll use to generate different hues. Ian Robinson also provides some project-saving advice for what happens when you don't have access to the full-res version of a logo. Last, you'll learn about the best formats for outputting animated logo bugs and animations that contain transparency.

This course was created and produced by RHED Pixel. We're honored to host this content in our library.